Excerpt

God, That’s Funny preview!

The total absence of humor in the Bible is one of the most singular things in all literature.

– Alfred North Whitehead

That’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.

– Me, when I read the above quote from Alfred North Whitehead

It took me way too long.

I have been a Christian since shortly after being potty-trained, and I fell in love with humor even before that. I have only ever really been influenced by funny people — my dad, C.S. Lewis, Woody Allen, Steve Martin, Steve Taylor, Steven Wright, every other guy named “Steve,” David Letterman and on and on. Lately I’m all about Don Quixote (by Steve Cervantes). IMHO, it’s funnier than the last 40 years of network television combined.

Humor is my language. It’s the only way I understand things. It’s the reason I started a satirical website and write satirical books. But somehow I never made the leap that God — the great God Jehovah, the I AM, the Beginning and the End — is at heart very funny and wants us all to relate to him that way.

Don’t get me wrong, I knew he was funny at times — in private with me and some of the people I knew. I knew he played tricks on us and set up funny situations and responded with funny answers when we spoke to him. But I was sure God saved his humor for backstage, to enjoy with a group of friends in our small, disappointing living rooms in southern California. When the God of the Bible did his public work I thought he cleared his throat, put on his best suit and left the jokes for the after-party.

How wrong I was.

God is the original comedian. He was slaying long before you and I were alive.

Through a series of circumstances I can only describe as “interesting” and “possibly sinful” I came to see that God is even more hilarious than I took him to be. He is not just funny on the way to whatever he’s doing; he is comedic by nature. He cannot resist a punchline. His behavior in the Bible is like one long series of jokes, stand-up performances and mischievous tricks. He uses all sorts of humor, from the gutter talk of George Carlin to the absurdity of Steve Martin to the insults of Don Rickles.

By “funny” I don’t mean God enjoys cute Christian humor about the “lighter side” of faith. Nor do I mean zany depictions of Christian family life a la Erma Bombeck, and I certainly don’t mean kids’ funny misquotations of popular hymns. If I end up somehow going to hell, and I aim not to, I have a feeling my cell will be lined with pages from Sermon Bloopers 4. And maybe forwards from my grandma about the dire future of America. (Kidding, Grandma.)

I also don’t mean jokes such as the one I call the Official Christian Joke: “God must have a sense of humor — he made you and me!”

And I don’t mean funny in the way that pastors and visiting evangelists often depict the disciples as bumbling sidekicks of their serious Savior. All of that ground is too well traveled, like an urban park trampled to a grassless, polished expanse. Blah.

For my secular readers, I also don’t mean funny in some conceptual way, as if God’s humor is abstract and somehow not humorous but just intellectually satisfying, the way hosts on NPR laugh which is always like an approximation of laughter, not the real thing. (I’m assuming here, for the sake of argument, that NPR hosts have souls.) There’s a strain of “how-to-have-joy-in-your-spiritual-life” books which present humor as a kind of afterthought one might want to consider, like a subscription to The Atlantic. I would rather read books on medieval English cuisine than books on how to have joy in my spiritual life.

When I say God is funny I mean he’s funny the way you and I and our friends are (or were, in college). The way your dad or funniest uncles are funny. The kind of funny where you laugh until your abdominal muscles limp home and die. The way your favorite shows and movies and comedians are funny. Real funny, not just “this should be funny so let’s pretend it is because it’s the best we’ve got.”

God is funnier and more mischievous than you or I will ever be. He didn’t create humor, he is humor. He is funny in real time and on purpose, in big ways and small ways, in the Bible and in our lives. God is the kind of comedian who comes down into the audience and messes with us personally. “Us” includes you.

The entire plan of God for humanity is, in my view, a cosmic joke and punchline. If you’ve ever sat outside a Jamba Juice pondering your pathetic existence and thought, “My life is a joke,” you’re exactly right. Let me be the first to welcome you to it.

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Gag reel

Humor is not like the Law. It was not given to us as some sort of concession, the way Moses allowed people to divorce. It is not of a lower order, something we get away with while God tut-tuts and shakes his head from above saying, “Those silly humans — when will they stop being so childish?”

If we knew the truth we’d shake our heads, look heavenward and say, “That silly Creator — when will he let up with all the gags?”

I’m guessing a lot of you got to this conclusion before I did. You know God plays jokes on you. If you’re like me, when this happens you probably think, “No one will ever believe this. I’d better not mention it at small group.” How do you tell someone, even a Christian brother or sister, that the God of the universe just messed with you on the way to the store or, worse yet, in your prayer time? That he set up circumstances to surprise you and make you laugh? Where is that in the Bible?

It is in the Bible, as we’ll see. But let me go back and explain the “possibly sinful” part of this introduction. I’m sorry it’s not juicier.

Here it is: I discovered God’s humor in the Bible by not reading the Bible for several years. There. Now it’s out in the open.

If you’re like one of those guys in an Iron Sharpens Iron group, or as I call them “Iron Goes to Denny’s at 6 a.m. to Discuss the Bible With Irons Who Don’t Really Get Him” group, you are probably giving a disapproving look. Or maybe you’re one of those types who reads through the Bible every year just to say you did it. Stay away from me, please. My number is unlisted. My grandma answers my email and she is a forwarding machine.

Yes, if you were like the prying men in one of my dismal accountability group experiences, you might ask, “Why did you quit reading the Bible? Can we all lay hands on Joel before the pancakes arrive?” The answer is that I had over-read the Bible. I had been reading or hearing it for the better part of 35 years, which is longer than Kurt Cobain’s and Lassie’s lives combined. The words had become as familiar to me as brushing my teeth, and you never want to confuse Bible reading with brushing your teeth. Who wants to brush their teeth every day for thirty minutes?

I had taken copious notes on the Bible and made thousands of observations which only I read. I became so familiar with the Bible that it stopped making sense to me. I knew every turn of phrase in the stupid NIV. I could repeat long passages, like some Bible Quiz wunderkind. Who wants to feel like a Bible Quiz wunderkind? It’s worse than brushing your teeth for half an hour.

So I sat down with my Bible and had a talk: “I need a break from our relationship,” I said. “It’s not you, it’s me. I’m not appreciating you anymore, and that’s unfair to both of us. I need space. I’m not going to read you for a while. It doesn’t mean I don’t love you. Let’s still be friends. Maybe we can get back together someday.”

Then I put my thin black Bible on a shelf, and there it sat. Eventually, it disappeared — I think I saw it floating around the car with its cover torn off, and then one of my kids must have taken it to church and lost it — or, you know, given it to an unsaved friend.

In the meantime I raised a few children, took up hobbies, wrote a lot of books and articles, made friends and kind of wished I hadn’t made some of them, started climbing the tallest snowy peaks in the lower 48. I even got re-married and moved to Zimbabwe and had eight wives, but that is actually a lie.

I read a stray Bible story here or there with my children, when they were impolite enough to ask for it, or while writing a book for some Christian author, which is one way I have (at times against my will) made a living. But I did it at arm’s length. I kept my distance from the Good Book. Instead, I watched a lot of television. You might say television became my devotional time. Not television where people make questionable moral choices. No, I watched dumb shows about how jelly beans are made, dogs are trained, pawn shop items are bought and sold and also Golden Girls re-runs. Oops — maybe that last one falls under “questionable moral choices.”

I had no desire to read the Bible during that time. I thought we might have broken up for good. This was no crisis of faith. I just felt that if the Bible wasn’t going to make sense to me, why read it? Somewhere in my mind, I blamed God for this, which is what all my Christian friends do in times of distress.

I played coy with God. I wanted him to chase me for a while. I didn’t go into abject sin (Golden Girls?). I just didn’t look in his direction. I talked to other people. I left the party without speaking to him.

Believe it or not, this kind of wooing often works for me.

Then something interesting happened. I felt a renewed hunger kick in, the kind you get before your ten-year high school reunion. Suddenly I wanted to see all those people again, not my high school friends but Bible people: Paul, Abraham, Ezekiel, even the lesser disciples. So I picked up the Bible in several different translations and began reading it.

All I could do was laugh. Not at the Bible, but with the Bible and with God. I realized that this is a humor book of the first order. It is God’s Don Quixote, his Candide, his Catch-22.

Creation was funny. Exodus was funny. Leviticus was funny, for heaven’s sake. Strange visions were a laugh riot and Jesus himself was hilarious, even when he was being led to his death.

I thought I may be seeing it wrong, so I put it down and came back to it a few weeks later. The same thing happened. My wife would catch me laughing through the book of Ezekiel, which is a strange thing to have to explain. Not only was the Bible funny to me, but the author, the Holy Spirit, was a comedian of the highest caliber. God was revealing a side of himself I’d never fully considered.

God is funny on purpose. He often messes with us. His humor is inseparable from his character. The human race and all of creation are part of his gag reel. If we’re not the audience then we’re the punchline or set-up. The world is a swirling cosmos of laugh lines which exist to give God kicks.

When I hinted at this line of thinking, people gave me strange looks. It probably confirmed their sneaking suspicions about me. “He says he’s a writer, but what does he do all day?” They probably prayed for my wife.

Nobody understood. Not my wife, not my close friends, not my funny friends, not my unfunny friends, not people at bus stops, not people in line at the grocery store and certainly not the guys in my former accountability group which I was smart enough to abandon. (By the way guys, I was only pretending to live the same boring Christian experience you were. In reality, I was observing you closely and making cruel fun of you in my writings. Ha ha! Quit the group for all I care. I already did.)

But I had discovered the truth: We are not so much sinners in the hands of an angry God as characters in his cosmic comedy routines. If you think I’m being glib or unserious, you may need this book more than anyone.

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Humor logic

Why are we so reluctant to see God this way? You and I and your three-year-old niece can recognize a joke or ironic comment a mile away in ordinary conversation, but we often don’t take that same sensibility to the Bible or our spiritual lives. We pack away our comedy antennae and listen only for the serious proclamations.

Maybe we associate humor with rebellion. Humor is laughing at authority. God is authority. God cannot be laughed at. What a bummer.

I’m aware of the old saying that if you look for the ridiculous in everything, you will find it. Humor can be like beer goggles. When you’ve got them on, everything is funny.

But it might be true that everything actually is ridiculous. The more I peer into the work of God in the Bible, the more it seems that “ridiculous” is not a bad word to describe the situation he put us in. Comedy goes to the heart of the good news. If you miss this, you miss a big part of who God is and who he wants to be in your life.

God is laughing all the time — sometimes with you, sometimes at you. He laughs at the bizarre world he made. He laughs at what we do and say. At the jokes he’s telling in our lives. Irony, mockery and funny imagery are some of his defining personality characteristics. You may not be a funny person, but he is.

I’m not saying God is always being humorous, just as comedians are not always being humorous. One of the unwelcome parts about being a humorist is that people expect you to be funny all the time, as if they expect everyone to do their professional work by request. Nobody says, “Hey, you’re an electrician. Would you mind fixing this lamp for me? Come on, we all want to see you fix a lamp!” But when they find out you write or speak comedy, they stand there grinning at you, waiting for you to say something funny. It’s horrible. Comedians are not always funny, and neither is God. Just ask the Ammonites, the Amorites, and all the other dead -ites who used to drive their shiny cars around Palestine.

I started this Introduction with a quote about the “total absence of humor in the Bible” from a guy named Alfred North Whitehead. In the spirit of Dave “Steve” Barry let me ask, why should we believe anyone who was named after a zit? More seriously, how could this gasbag possibly be wronger? The Bible is full of humor. It’s even “chock” full. Whitehead’s “point” reveals more about him than about the Bible.

And so my publisher prompts me to ask, what’s in it for you, selfish reader? How will this revelation of God’s humor change your life more than the two mocha Frappuccinos you might otherwise get with the money? First, I can assure you I’m not going through every verse of the Bible. That would be unfunny and produce a book so big it would sell for $299.99 and weigh ten pounds even on an e-reader.

I’m also not going to do as other books have done and quote a lot of scholars. Like most of you, I am in the fortunate position of not being a Bible scholar. Bible scholars have ugly wives and depressing, subterranean offices in little-known colleges somewhere in the Midwest. They are always thinking in three languages, which leaves little time for pretending to be human.

Instead I’m going to talk about God’s humor the way I choose to — as it strikes me, using my “humor logic” the way I do when watching YouTube and deciding to send a link to a friend, or writing a LarkNews story. I want to talk about different parts of the Bible, because I find humor in unexpected places. There is priceless humor from Genesis all the way to Revelation but I’ll pick the choicest cuts. I’ll also include plenty of references to popular culture to invite positive reviews from 20-something magazine writers. Just kidding. See how I’m kidding already? What fun this will be.

By the end you will understand God better than you ever have. You will see that he wants to laugh with you, to mess with you. The Bible says that to the pure he shows himself pure, to the faithful he shows himself faithful (Psalm 18:25-26). I would extend that principle and say to the humorous he shows himself hilarious. He is just waiting for you.

You will see God not just as Our Father but as the Father of Humor and a Very Funny Guy. You’ll see he doesn’t like to play it straight. You will start laughing while reading the Bible. You will laugh at your pastor. You will laugh at your Christian friends and your non-Christian friends and your customers. You’ll basically turn into a jerk. For some of you, that will be an improvement.

You will also want to buy many copies of this book for friends, some of whom maybe haven’t laughed visibly in, say, fifteen years. I am doing my Obi Wan Kenobi hand motion here — “You feel like buying 27 copies of this book. Visit an online book retailer now …”

You certainly never will see God or humanity or your own trifling existence the same way. And there are worse things that could happen.